Pitney pushes Net postage meters

Pitney Bowes, which dominates the
market for postage meters in the physical world, is moving to license its
computer-based postage metering patents to vendors of digital mailing
services.

Pitney's push is an effort to tap a rapidly growing digital postage
metering market in which businesses hope to rely on downloaded stamps for
all their mailing needs.

The company said it has been active in developing computer generated
metering technology for many years. "Many of our original metering-related
patents applications were filed in the 1980s," Pitney Bowes' general
counsel Melvin Scolnick said in a statement. "These early patents were actually
only the beginning of many significant patent filings subsequently made in
PC postage-related technology."

Pitney spokeswoman Sheryl Battles said the company was in discussions with
E-Stamp and Stamp Master, both
privately held companies, to license Pitney's patented technology.

Other patents Pitney's holds include cryptographic "signatures" on data;
verification systems to authenticate sender information; and methods to
maintain the security and records of the amount of postage printed.

Pitney and other companies may have to play catch-up with E-Stamp, which has
created a system for buying postage stamps over the Internet and was the
first to make it through the U.S. Post
Office's arduous screening process. E-Stamp's technology allows users
to download postage from the Net and print it directly onto envelopes using
software, a small piece of hardware, and a standard printer.